


but for endless ifs

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Category: Brothers Bloom (2008)
Genre: Aftermath, Construction, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Home, Homelessness, New Jersey, Penelope watches This Old House, Yuletide 2011
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 20:30:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bloom and Penelope take the long way home, in that they don’t know quite where to go in order to find it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but for endless ifs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flyakate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyakate/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Flyakate! I hope you enjoy the story I wrote for you.
> 
> Title from Lisel Mueller’s poem, “Alive Together.”

 After—Bloom discovers that he hates the thought of it, but here he is: still living, regardless of the past—they go to Reykjavik, and he locks himself in a tiny restaurant bathroom and tries to soak the blood from his cuffs. When he emerges, Penelope leans heavily against the door, squinting at the horizon and holding a paper cup full of lamb stew, which smells terrible. Bloom’s never had much of a stomach for cultural dishes outside of France, and Stephen always took the time to point out that Bloom was, essentially, a Philistine. Bloom eats the soup and vomits it up again, smoothly, all down Penelope’s arm.

“Well,” Penelope says after her turn in the bathroom, where she tries to rinse his sick off her sleeve, “it was worth a shot.”

She buys a cup of tea with lemon instead, and leaves the teabag out; she spills a little of it on herself, probably so she doesn’t smell like puke, and hands it over. Bloom knows now that he’s in love with her, and she might be the most fantastic person in the world, so of course he swallows too quickly and burns his tongue.

They fly from Iceland to Ohio, and from there to Florida; Penelope is either very thorough, following an itinerary, or just wants to go to South America, because they fly to Brazil and spend the night in the airport.

“What’s next?” Bloom asks, because he always asks what’s next; it’s either that or wait for the future to be announced.

“I blew up my house,” Penelope says, meditatively (she picked up meditation about the same time, and has spent the last two hours in full lotus, her fists loosely aligned along the knuckles, her posture impeccable). “But I bought us tickets to Newark anyway, just in case.” She opens one eye, then the other, and then she’s staring at Bloom, her face pale and smudged with travel, her mouth so still it looks as though another word won’t ever come out of it.

“Were you ever going to tell me?” He feels tired, wrecked, even; there is still blood down the front of his shirt.

“You asked,” she points out. “But our flight leaves in a couple hours, so, probably. But you might have figured it out.”

They go through security again and Bloom’s too jetlagged to notice everyone in line staring at him.

“You’ve got to stop taking jobs as an extra in horror movies,” Penelope deadpans over her shoulder, and everyone immediately stops watching them. It’s a neat trick, her ability to treat him like he’s not a sloppy, emotional mess.

Bloom hates flying, has hated it ever since he hit his first growth spurt, and that was the same time Stephen started writing poetic long cons that required luxury, slow travel, and legroom. Penelope is clearly improvising, but she lets him fall against her while he sleeps, and Bloom doesn’t—surprisingly—wake until the plane taxies into Newark. He’s got his face mashed against her breast, and if Penelope is even a little like any other woman he’s ever fucked, that’s got to be uncomfortable.

Penelope—isn’t like anyone Bloom has ever known, least of all because of her strange likeability. Five minutes into their cab ride, the driver—Georgian, homesick, father of three—has unearthed a hotel and offered his only son as a bridegroom, in case Penelope’s looking. She looks like she thinks it over before turning him down, and Bloom, feeling possessive and naïve, wraps his fingers around her hand.

The hotel, when they find it, is nice, and cheap, and quiet. He’d like to sleep for the rest of the year.

*

“Do you like Gehry?” Bloom asks the next morning at breakfast, partly to break the quiet mood Penelope’s had wrapped around her since waking, and partly because the newspaper headlines promise that this architect, at least, is less interested in tradition and thematic resonance.

Penelope stirs her oatmeal into a fine sludge and takes so long to answer that he nearly gets stage fright. It’s ridiculous; this is real life, and it is happening now, regardless of what Bloom thinks or feels. It feels very much like every con he’s ever played; he hates it.

“I really prefer Kazuyo Sejima,” she says suddenly, and scrapes her plastic spoon around the cardboard rim of the container. “Better lines, better movement, doesn’t look like it’ll fall down on top of you. Gehry makes me motionsick. Hey, I want to show you something. Just consider it,” she wheedles, and pushes a napkin towards him; she’s written, in several different styles, PENELOPE THE HOMEOWNER.

“What,” Bloom says, his voice as flat as he can make it. She’s made the Os of her name into little flowers with smiley faces.

“Wouldn’t it be fun to buy a little house—oh, relax, Bloom, just a _little_ one,” Penolope warms on the theme and simultaneously takes all the wind out of his sails. “We could learn how to fix the plumbing and buy groceries—”

“You had a house,” he points out, helplessly. “You had a mansion, until you _blew it up._ ”

“I was finished with it,” she says primly, reclaiming the napkin. “besides, I inherited it, it wasn’t really mine, and everything was delivered. Things matter more when they’re yours. When you make them yourself.”

Bloom, living an unscripted life that does not involve heavy drinking and falling asleep with a cigar in his teeth, wants to believe her. He does, in fact, have some money squirreled away. Just enough money to buy a very small house and start over. This is not Penelope’s worst idea.

“It’s a good story, isn’t it?”

“It is a good story,” he allows.

“No gardens,” Penelope warns him. “You already have an overdeveloped sense of metaphor.”

*

This is a story about the house Bloom bought and the home he then built. 

*

The house, when they find it, is (first, worst) in a suburb and at the bottom of a godforsaken hill. The basement and the first floor are tucked into the slope of the landscape and the second floor perches unsteadily on top of the mess; there’s a one-car garage and an untidy, unfinished attic with two gables and not much room. It’s a small house with wood siding and very little brick. There is no yard to speak of, the bathrooms are gutted, and the only thing really in its favor is the price and the furnishings that come with it: an armoire, a bed, a table _sans_ chairs. Penelope sleuths through all three levels of the house without even taking off her scarf and Bloom trails after her, if only to keep her from hooking herself on a doorjamb. He’s pretty sure they’re going to take it, which means he is going to drive Penelope everywhere if he doesn’t want her to strip the gears on the car.

They do take it; Bloom muddles together a dummy account that lets him pay the house off over ten months, which is less suspicious than cash and about as long as it takes to tear out the basement tile and discover asbestos everywhere. He feels finicky and high strung, and the neurosis is offset by Penelope’s eerie serenity; she keeps mediating right in the middle of the floor and he keeps tripping over her.

Penelope, Bloom discovers upon cohabitation, is insidious; every time he wants a cup of coffee, she’s using the filters for a plumbing project; every time he wants to sit on the john, she’s re-grouting the bathroom tile. Even in the old days, in their tiny apartment, Bloom and Stephen always rattled around like dried peas in a skull, and Bloom can’t quite comprehend the endless enormity of the house and the shrinking area of his personal space. He likes even less the way she is absorbed with the framework; Bloom is just bored by structure in general, but Penelope seems to pass through boredom and into fascination pretty quickly.

“It’s a good house,” she defends, kissing him awkwardly across the ear. “There’s always going to be something wrong with it. Which means there’s always something to fix.”

“A house is not a hobby,” he answers back, slipping one hand under the back of her shirt; she’s been wrestling with the pipes in the basement again and she’s damp with sweat and gritty with rust. “And buying a broken house for the express purpose of mucking around in the basement is ridiculous.”

“It _is_ hobby,” Penelope licks his check affectionately, wetly, and with great enthusiasm. “There are whole television channels for it. Stop cheating yourself, Bloom; this is yours, too.”

*

Sometimes, when he can’t take the way Penelope sinks her teeth into a project—she doesn’t even remember that Bloom is _right there_ —he storms out of the house and walks up and down the rolling hills of the suburb, hands in his pockets, waiting until he’s too cold to stay angry. Somehow, he never gets that cold: the complex is a maze and the road is steep, and Bloom is skinny, not fit; he always works up a sweat.

If Stephen were alive, he’d slap Bloom across the back and laugh, and tell him that this is part of being a man. Stephen is dead and in another country, and Bloom spent years half-listening and half-tuning him out, to the point where he can’t even think, _this is what Stephen would say_. He really only remembers the tone of voice, the weight of every year they ran together and didn’t have a home.

Bloom has no imagination to speak of, but he still pretends he can hear Stephen speaking, grandiose and affectionate as ever, saying: _I’m proud of you_.

*

It takes a long time for the dust to settle and for Penelope to finish grouting the bathroom tiles (she uses blue grout. It’s nice). In the meantime, Bloom cleans. He’s good at it and Penelope either is no good at it or simply doesn’t care, so he makes it his job. His _hobby_.

He learns to sweep with the grain of the wood floor, and he registers their name on the stupid mailbox (Penelope demanded one that looked like a fish: their mailbox looks like a fish, and Bloom feels like a loon), and he even applies for a library card. Penelope checks out _Trumpet of the Swan_ and they read it in bed, she lying on her side and under his elbow so she can see the pictures; she likes Sam. He feels a sudden, painful kinship with mute Louis and all of his possessions.

Bloom has always been bad at putting the pieces together, but even he can see where this is going.

They’ve really only been in the house for three months, in that is has been habitable for three months—about as long as Bloom has lived anywhere off a con—when one evening, as he pulls the car towards the garage, clicking the remote to open the door, the whole side of the house collapses in on itself with a loud clamor and not an insubstantial amount of smoke. Bloom has the driver-side window open—it’s a nice night—and the dust chokes him.

Before he has a chance to unfasten his seatbelt, or even panic, Penelope has scrabbled free of her own, thrown open the passenger-side door, and stumbled down the drive to the smoking ruin of the one-car garage and half-renovated attic, because Bang Bang is sitting on the front step, a cigarette held to her lips like a smoking gun.

*

Bang Bang makes it clear she's moving in and camps out in the attic, even though a wall's blown off (Penelope tapes a plastic tarp along the exposed edges), surrounded by Russian novels, Kipling, and Melville’s lesser works. She must have loved Stephen, or something like it; Bloom’s not sure how he can tell, because it’s not like she says anything—unless Penelope’s picked up Morse code and the two tap messages out on the kitchen table—but it’s a good, clean feeling. The knowledge that Stephen has not gone unmourned.

The explosion was her way of saying hello, and it looks convincingly like a gas leak; the insurance company grumbles and pays for the repairs by sending a team of old workmen to fix the house. They stomp through the halls for a few days, smoking imported cigarettes and singing in Polish, and Bloom makes himself scarcer than usual. Polish is close enough to Russian when you aren't fluent, and fourteen months is not a very long time.

He comes back after the work is done and sweeps the sawdust from the new stairs. Bang Bang sits on the top step and watches him crouch his way down the whole flight, dustpan and brush in hand.

“She’s not done with the house,” he says. Bang Bang gives him an impassive look, as though he has told her to go fuck herself and she is ignoring his incomparable rudeness. Bloom wants to bite off his own tongue.

“Whoever built this thing decided to only do renovations when he was on a bender,” he tries again. “He did this thing with the upstairs tub and it doesn’t drain properly, that’s gonna take her at least another year to figure out.” He tips the dustpan into the garbage sack at the bottom of the stairs. “I don’t know how long it’ll take to finish your room.”

Bang Bang nods and surveys her manicured fingernails. Penelope calls him from the kitchen, where she’s brewing blacktop sealant for the craggy driveway, but it’s Bang Bang who goes to her. Bloom wonders how long she will stay, this time around, and what she'll get rid of when she leaves.

*

“I miss him,” he says to the top of Penelope’s head. It’s late morning, and they still haven’t rolled out of bed. Bloom thinks that it might be October, but he’s lost track of time.

Penelope rears up under the bedclothes, her hair tangled soft around her face, and kisses him. She’s gotten better at it; his heart contracts in his chest, and desire begins to fill him like hot water.

“Well,” she says against his mouth, low and thoughtful. “You’ll probably always miss him.”

Bloom strokes the line of her shoulder, palms her breast out of habit. Penelope rolls out of his grasp and lies back down alongside him.

“We could have baby,” she says. “Stephen would have liked that, I think.”

“A baby,” Bloom’s voice isn’t as disbelieving as he’d like, and he feels homesick for comfort in his own skin. “That’s a terrible idea.”

“We’d make Bang Bang godmother, of course.”

“I didn’t say we should have a baby.”

“No,” Penelope says, straddling him. “And we might not. But you didn’t say we shouldn’t, either.”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Bloom says, though it comes out more as a gasp, part arousal and part discomfort; her knee knocks his rib and pushes the breath out of him. She leans against him, rubs at his chest, his jaw.

“The thing that’s important,” Penelope's voice is offhand and serious and he loves her, “is that you never know. You’re always just feeling your way.”

**Author's Note:**

> Penelope’s last line is from Diane Arbus, the same photographer who inspired her “a photograph is a secret about a secret” quote in the film. I imagine their house is somewhere in Holmdel, NJ.


End file.
